By Roger Joyce
On a day in Australia when everyone is talking about war, I’d prefer to talk about love… actually.
So began an article I wrote on a screenwriting blog, nearly 20 years ago. I’m reminded of my own words, for it was ANZAC day again on the weekend and for the fortieth year in a row, there was a sense of disquiet on my Western Front.
If I were invited to be a contributor to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, my topic would be something along the lines of “what’s the statute of limitations on war remembrance?” or “when is it okay to stop remembering?” I think of this as a “dangerous idea” as of all of the topics I’ve ever got into conversation or robust debate about in this country, anything that whiffs of alternative thinking in regards “ANZAC” is taboo. You can argue about the indigenous population and first settlement, pass the hot potato of republicanism and the flag, debate gender identity, but the questioning of ANZAC is much more of a love that dare not speak its name.
I’m reminded of the quote by the cricketer Bill “Tiger” O’Reilly: “…the world frowns upon those who spit on statues.”
A different kind of war remembrance
I’m English by birth, but migrated here, to Sydney, in 1987, not quite, but almost on the eve of ANZAC Day. That first 25th April, I vividly remember thinking “wow, this is a country that really embraces its war remembrance.” Maybe it’s because I’d come off the back of 28 years of a different kind of war remembrance.
You see, for me Remembrance Day or “Poppy Day” – the closest Sunday to the 11th of the 11th, Armistice Day itself – is always a bleak, grey autumnal day and as a boy, I would watch the somber ceremony from the Cenotaph in Whitehall on black and white television, with my father. Elderly men wore long, dark Crombies, the military needed their greatcoats to keep out the ferocious chill that blew down from Parliament Square, all to the soundtrack of a muffled drum and the funereal march of Elgar’s Nimrod.
I wasn’t prepared for the glaring sunlight of an April morning in Sydney and grandchildren wearing medals. I also found it difficult to see elderly men deified and borne aloft on this one day and then ignored, left to their elderly shufflings for the rest of the year.
My English family’s war story is probably not unlike most of my fellow countrymen and women: my grandfather fought in the Great War, I had a great uncle who was a Spitfire pilot in WWII and my mother – then a young girl – spent frightened nights sheltering under the dining table of her south London home as the payloads of enemy aircraft fell on her and others in London; her father absent from his loved ones, out doing his job as a Metropolitan policeman. I grew up in the 1960’s on a “romantic” diet of films detailing “how we won the war”: Reach For The Sky, The Dam Busters, 633 Squadron and The Bridge On The River Kwai.
Why do we choose to remember?
For me, there are two purposes to war remembrance, two reasons why we pause and reflect: the first is gratitude, to give thanks to those men and women – our forebears – who made the ultimate sacrifice, for me, for us, so that we might lead the free life that we do. The second reason is in the hope that the grim recollection of such awful conflict might, just might prevent us from ever warring again. Alas, the second reason is but a pipe dream.
But here’s where my own idea gets potentially dangerous. In idle moments when I play that game of “If I were Prime Minister, the first thing I’d do is…”, one of the first things I’d do is put forward the idea of a moratorium on war remembrance. What if – as an experiment – for a year or two, we swapped thoughts of recollection of war for considerations of peace? Instead of all the column inches written and the minutes of airtime given to talking about, thinking about and breathing in the intoxicating Australian oxygen of ANZAC, we turned our attention to words, images and thoughts that encourage and foster peace?
I wonder when it is time to stop looking over our shoulders to worship at the altar of the past – for is not ANZAC our new religion – and to look ahead to, behold the future? I know it’s a controversial thought.
Earlier in this piece about peace, I talked of my personal “disquiet”, for that is truly what I feel. I don’t want to dismiss history, for we ignore the lessons of the past at our peril, I don’t want to ban or censor all thoughts of war for it is part of the human condition and I indulge as much as anyone. I’ve just finished reading Peter Rees’s Lancaster Men, an extraordinarily moving book about the 10,000 Australians who served with Bomber Command in Word War II; men who on returning to Australia, were accused of “hiding in England while we were doing it tough.”
So, on Saturday, this Englishman of 67 years, now an Australian of nearly 40, paused in thought, thanked those that I am greatly indebted to and turned my mind to peace and love actually.
Roger Joyce is a ghostwriter and biographer.
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